The Art of Taxation

March 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I saw this,


I knew it had to be one of the New York abstract impressionists. But which one? Frank Stella gone curvy? Morris Louis turned sideways and making clearer line separations? Kenneth Noland?
But it’s a graph of taxpayers (original here). Here it is with title and axis labels:

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

It shows the relative tax burden by income level. Each horizontal line is a year, its width “sized and colored by the tax burden: the amount of tax due relative to the long-term average at each income level. Above-average burdens appear thick and red and below-average thin and blue.” The wedge of blue that begins at $8000 in 1974 is the Carter era change that excluded low-wage earners from the income tax.

I mentally divided the graph at the $100K vertical and looked at the relative shares since about 1980. The graph shows what everyone knows – the very rich, who had been paying a bit more in the Clinton years, made out like bandits in the Bush years. In the graph, they have recaptured their 1920s position as the thin blue line. But the Bush tax cuts lightened the burden of the poor and even middle-income people. Hence, the deficits that Republicans are now so concerned about.

I leave it to critics like Flâneuse to say what in the graph needs work. What struck me was the similarity between data and art.*

Last year’s version of the same data seemed much harder to read. It also looked very much like some of Clyfford Still’s canvases.



* “The graph is better; at least it has meaning.” That was the reaction of my friend Sol, an actual artist who in his youth studied with the New York School gang, lived down the street from the Cedar Tavern, and even played mandolin with Rothko. So I respect his opinion (I also use his casual sketch of me as my Facebook pic).

The Opinions of Mankind

March 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Ed Koch, when he was mayor of New York, used to ask, “How’m I doing?”

A recent Gallup report, based on surveys in more than 100 countries has an answer: Generally, the Obama bump – the huge boost in favorable views of the US leadership – has held.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Yes, in 2007 and 2008, the US Bush-Cheney team was trailing a few points behind the authoritarian bureaucrats running China. Now, thanks to the election of Obama, we’re Number One. (See my post-inauguration post.) (In some countries, positive views of the US administration have slipped in the past year, but they are still well above the Bush era ratings.)

Views of America and Americans are much less volatile than views of our leaders. The country remains by far the country people would most like to move to (Gallup does not show data for previous years, but it’s probably not much different).

I also suspect that views of American people have also been steadily positive, even when our government was greatly disliked. They like us, they really like us. Of course, the Americans that go abroad and become de facto PR agents are not a representative sample of the population. They are probably more affluent. They also are much more likely to come from liberal states (in the map below – found here – “blue” states are white or light gray).

Poltical Culture

March 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Keith Humphreys (here) comments on the reactions of the British to Margaret Thatcher’s dementia, first made public in 2008.

When [Ronald Reagan] was revealed to have Alzheimer’s disease, many people who voted against him voiced sincere sympathy for what he and his family were going through. In contrast . . . if Ms. Thatcher’s own dementia is generating sympathy in Brits who hated her policies, they are doing a frightfully good job of hiding it. I don’t even hear much sympathy from people who did vote for her.

Matt Yglesias (here) explains this with some electoral data. Thatcher was never the preference of the majority of voters. Her election wins were all minority: “a three way election in 1979 with 44 percent of the vote. In 1983 her support slipped slightly to more like 43 percent. In 1987 she won again, but her support further dropped to around 42 percent.”

Matt concludes,

the ability of a prime minister to wield extraordinary power based on a parliamentary majority obtained with an electoral minority seems likely to engender a lot of bitterness.

Political culture may also have something to do with it. In the US, the President is also the symbolic head of the nation. In the UK, that function belongs to the Queen. The President, even after he leaves office, is still addressed as Mr. President. The Prime Minister is just a politician. (See an earlier post on this here.)

Matt’s post, especially that last comment, took me back to a personal incident that suggests other differences in political cultures. In August of 2005, we rented a flat in London – Vauxhall, just south of the river – for a few days. The woman we rented from met us at Victoria station in her Toyota and gave us a motor tour of London before taking us to the flat. (She had been in the travel business and was now retired, which is why she could rent out her flat while she removed to a family house in Sussex.) “There’s no Brits in London any more,” she said pointing to the pedestrians as we passed. And indeed, there were many who looked to be Asian, Arab, or African. She also complained about the “queers” in her neighborhood.

In the US, a person who talked like that would surely have voted for Bush and other Republicans. So I quickly pegged her as a hardline Thatcherite Conservative. But as we drove through Westminster, she slowed a bit and pointed up at a bronze statue.

“That’s Oliver Cromwell,” she said, “the only dictator Britain’s ever had. Except for Maggie Thatcher.”

Weber Fails B-School (or the Other Way Round)

March 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Having written a textbook, I know that textbooks don’t get everything right, but c’mon guys.

From Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets

Focusing on Max Weber, Cummings and Bridgman document a series of whoppers that appear consistently in leading management texts, such as the belief that “ideal type” means best or optimal; that Weber did his major work in the 1940s (Parsons’s translation of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft appeared in 1947, 27 years after Weber’s death); that Weber personally admired bureaucracy (In Search of Excellence avers that Weber “pooh-poohed charismatic leadership and doted on bureaucracy”); and other gross misunderstandings. FAIL

(I'm surprised that the OrgTheorists didn’t pick this up.)

Ethnocentrism and Family Values

March 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When Alexandra Wallace’s video – the epiphanus interruptus* complaint about Asians at UCLA using their cell phones in the library – went viral, most of the reactions were accusations of racism. I'm not sure where the line between racism and ethnocentrism lies, but I was struck more by the underlying ethnocentric assumptions about family, assumptions that are widely shared here and by people who would never be accused of racism.

We Americans all agree that we value family. When I begin the unit on culture, I ask students to jot down three American values. The one that appears most frequently is family. If I asked students what things they themselves value, I’m sure many of them would say family. So, I suspect, would Ms. Wallace.

But here’s how she begins her rant, after a brief disclaimer:

It used to really bug me but it doesn't bother me anymore the fact that all the Asian people that live in all the apartments around me – their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they've brought along from Asia with them – comes here on the weekends to do their laundry, buy their groceries, and cook their food for the week. It's seriously, without fail. You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend. That's what they do.

(The transcript does not quite do justice to Ms. Wallace’s presentation. The video was taken down, but in 2018 a copy became available.)

These Asian families, in Ms. Wallace’s view, include too many peripheral members (grandparents, cousins). And family members spend too much time together and do entirely too much for one another.

The trouble apparently is that Asians really do value family.

The too-much-family motif runs through her objections about cell phones as well She obviously doesn’t know what the callers are saying or who they’re talking to, but she suspects that it’s family back in Asia:

I swear they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing.**

Many international students in the US have noted this same contradiction between Americans’ proclaimed value on family in the abstract and what to the international students seems like a fairly thin and compartmentalized connection to family in the real world. As Rebekah Nathan says in My Freshman Year,

Americans, they felt, sharply distinguished their family from their friends and schoolmates; more than one international student remarked about the dearth of family photos on student doors,*** as if family didn’t exist at school. . . .Peter [a student from Germany] told me . . . “No one here says, “come on and meet my family.”

Do, do Americans value family? Yes, but. . . . The ‘but’ is a competing value that pervades American culture, including the family – Independence.**** As Ms. Wallace says in the conclusion to her complaint about Asian families, “They don't teach their kids to fend for themselves.”

-------------

*

I'll be in like deep into my studying . . . getting it all down, like typing away furiously, blah blah, blah, and then all of a sudden when I’m about to like reach an epiphany... Over here from somewhere, “Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.”

** Adding “thing” to “the tsunami” makes Wallace seem especially callous. Linguists must have looked into this, but for some reason, “thing” here implies, “I don’t know or care much about this because it’s not very important.”

I vividly recall a scene in the 1993 film “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” where Joe Mantegna, as the competitive chess father, is at a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is concerned that Mantegna’s chess-prodigy son (age 8 or so) is falling behind academically and socially. She adds,

I'm sure he's very good at this chess thing,
but that isn't really the issue.

Mantegna loses it.

My son has a gift. He has a gift, and once you
acknowledge that, then maybe we'll have something
to talk about. Chess is what it’s called.
Not the “chess thing.”

*** If you watch the Wallace video, look at the board of photos behind her and try to find parents.

**** See my earlier post on the family-vs,-independence conflict as it appears on American television, especially in sitcoms that have pretensions of seriousness.

March Wisdom

March 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m skeptical about the Wisdom of Crowds, at least when it comes to sports betting. I’ve blogged as much occasionally (the occasion usually being a big NFL game – see this post, for example).

Now Mark McClusky at Wired has taken up the fight in the arena of March Madness. The crowd whose wisdom he’s challenging is the ESPN online pool. Against them he pits “two top college basketball analysts.” Here’s a reduced spreadsheet with the large Crowd-Expert discrepancies highlighted. If you’re betting, it’s red for bad, green for good.

(Click on the chart for a larger view. The full spreadsheet is here.)

As McClusky notes, “most of the top seeds are highly inflated, especially Kansas.” Also, “Mountain West pair of San Diego State and Brigham Young are two of the best values out there.” He also said – and this article was posted Wednesday –

The single biggest gap between the two sets of picks? Utah State vs. Kansas State in the first round. According to the numbers, Utah State has a 57 percent likelihood of knocking off the higher-seeded Wildcats, but 73 percent of ESPN users have picked Kansas State.

Kansas State opened as 1 ½-point favorites. That line was bet up to 2. The Crowd was wise this time, both in their brackets and their bets. Kansas State 73, Utah State 68.

We’ll see how the rest of the tournament goes.

h/t Max

UPDATE, March 22: Never too late, the master of brackets Ted McCagg has finally posted his March Madness drawing (here).

Foul!

March 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Philip Cohen says (though not in his Family Inequality blog) that of the players in the NCAA tournament, sociology majors have the highest average (game points, not grade point). He links to an article by Justin Peters in Slate about “student athletes.”

Sociology is nowhere near the most popular major on the floor. Business, Communications, Humanities, and Sports Science beat us out. Nevertheless, Peters delivers this bit of trash talk

Forty-two players study sociology, that tried-and-true slackers' major. While it’s possible that UCLA players are disproportionately drawn to the sociology department for the chance to study with famed Marxist theorist Perry Anderson, it's more likely that a shooting guard would choose it because, as one of the largest majors at UCLA, nobody will notice if you don't come to class.

Hey, ref, how ’bout a T for that?

Athletes do tend to cluster in certain majors. Which major it is depends on the school and the team. For UCLA hoops, it may be sociology, for Georgia Tech football, it’s business. But the reasons for these learning communities are not the ones Perry mentions. More likely, coaches direct their players to jock-friendly majors. Different coaches have different ideas about what a good major is (and perhaps different friends on the faculty).

(I blogged this a couple of years ago – here ,with a link to an interactive graphic which I think is still working.)

Tax Expenditures

March 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“To spend is to tax.” Milton Friedman’s dictum means that spending and taxing eventually have to be in balance. No free lunch. If the government spends money on something, eventually the government has to pay for it, and the government gets its money from taxes.* This is the basis of Republicans shouting about deficits and trying to outdo one another on cutting spending.

At the individual level, people feel that government spending is like robbery. Because the government has to tax in order to spend, the government is taking money out of your pocket and spending it on someone else (the military, Medicare, etc.).

There are two ways to increase deficits – spending more or taxing less. So not to tax is also like spending. If the government leaves more money in my pocket by taxing me less, it has to make it up by taxing you more. Taxing me less has the same effect as spending more. They both take money out of your pocket. That’s why tax breaks are “tax expenditures.”

Which costs more – tax expenditures or spending?


The chart is from Senate Budget Committee testimony by Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The tax breaks cost us more than even our biggest of big-ticket items.

No surprise, tax breaks work mostly to the benefit of the wealthy. The mortgage deduction on a couple of million dollar homes (yes, second homes also get the tax break) costs the government more than the deduction on a $150,000 home (or the $0 deduction on a rental). The lower tax rate on money made in the stock market benefits people who own a lot of stock. Guess who that is.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

In the graph, the tax expenditure bar stands way above Medicare and Social Security. And those bars are 100 times larger than Head Start. So if you’re wondering who is taking money out of your pocket, drive through the nice neighborhoods and look at the big houses. Maybe even stop, knock on a door or two, and ask to see their Schedules A and D.

*The government can also borrow, but debts must be repaid. The government can print money, but the subsequent inflation is also a tax since it decreases the value of the money in your pocket.

Politics and Negative Results

March 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social scientists often end their reports and articles with suggestions for further research. Politicians, not so much. They want action. (Didn't Weber say something about this?)

There’s a government program for kids that is very popular among the low-income parents, but a recent large-scale government study shows that it produces no lasting educational benefits. What to do? If you’re a conservative, you get rid of it – all in the name of cutting costs of course. The program is Head Start, and funding for it is under heavy attack from the right.* (NYT story here).

Charter schools have a similar profile.. Low-income parents want them, but the broadest research shows that on average, compared with public schools, charters do no better and probably worse. Yet conservatives can’t fund enough of them.

Liberals may be almost as inconsistent, backing Head Start while opposing charters. I say “almost” because Head Start does produce some benefits. As the Times article reported,

Research on the program has shown that children who complete it do better socially and academically than children not enrolled in the program, and that they tend to have lower high school dropout rates. But the initial test score benefits tend to fade out by first grade.

So the “doesn’t work” mantra being repeated on the right is not quite accurate.

In both cases, what seems like a reasonable idea hasn’t worked out in practice. True, some charter schools and some Head Start programs do produce positive results. The trouble is that there’s no evidence of consistent, broad success. You’d think, especially if you are a social scientist, that the next step would be further research to figure out what the effective ones are doing that the ineffective ones are not (and vice versa). Maybe such research does exist, but if so, it’s not getting much press.

Instead, politicians to take a baby-with-the-bathwater approach. If a program fits with your ideology, fund it, no questions asked. If not, get rid of it.


* The first post on this blog (including an apt joke borrowed from Kieran Healy) was about the scant attention given to negative findings . I had not realized then that when the findings are in the interests of those with easy access to the media, the noise level can rise considerably.

Weakly Standards

March 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

File this under “Things that people at the Weekly Standard are delighted about.” It’s from last Sunday’s Weekend Edition with Lynn Neary on (dare I say it?) NPR.

NEARY: And your son did in fact get into a school that he was happy about.

Mr. FERGUSON: Yes, absolutely. Our first meeting with his college counselor at high school involved him telling the counselor what kind of school he wanted, and my son being my son said, look, I want to go to a school where I can go to a football game, take off my shirt, paint my chest in the school colors and major in beer. And you should have seen the look on that college - this was the guy who was going to write him his recommendation. I was just delighted that my son was like that.

But as it turns out, that’s where he went. He hasn’t painted his chest yet, but pretty close I think. And he's definitely majoring in beer.

(Soundbite of laughter)

NEARY: Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. His new book is Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College.

Assimilation and Rejection

March 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Services Unit (ESU) [of the NYPD] raided the apartment of two Middle Eastern terrorists who were in possession of bombs that they planned to detonate in the New York subway that morning.

So begins Seven Shots, An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and its Aftermath by my colleague Jennifer Hunt and recently published by U. of Chicago Press.

The police had been tipped off by a Pakistani immigrant, Mohammed Chindluri. Had he not said anything, it’s very likely that scores of New Yorkers, hundreds perhaps, would have been killed during the morning rush hour.

Why did Chindluri inform on the men who had been his roommates? It seems only natural. You know that someone is planning to bomb a subway station, you go to the police.

That was in 1997. But here is what I worry about now. I imagine a Mohammed Chindluri today. He has seen and heard the demonstrations in New York saying that his religion does not have a right to construct a house of worship on Park Place in lower Manhattan. He has heard that a New York congressman is holding hearings to show how Muslims are a terrorist threat to the US. Will this Mohammed Chindluri feel the same human impulse to save Americans whose lives are in danger? Or might he think, “They have drawn a line and put me on the other side; I owe them nothing”?

I wish I knew of some good research on what happens to people who find themselves vilified because they share some characteristic (ethnicity, religion) with a few people who are a real danger. My concern is not just academic. The people who are stirring up the fear and hatred against Muslims may be making themselves feel virtuous (patriots defending their country), but they may also be raising the actual risk of terrorism. But those unintended consequences will not be borne by the demonstrators. Most of the people riding the Muslims-are-terrorists bandwagon don’t take the subway. They live in places that are unlikely to be targets. No, the risks will be borne by those of us who live in cities and use public transportation. Thanks, guys.

Of course, Rep. King’s hearings could persuade American Muslims to be even more vigilant and to root out and inform on all possible terrorist recruits. But maybe not.

Suppose that Rep. King held hearings on other groups who rank far above Muslims on the FBI’s list of terrorist threats: militia/patriot groups, freemen/sovereign citizen, extreme anti-tax, and extreme anti-immigrant. How about Christian Identity?

Congress to Hold Hearings on Terrorist Threat Posed by Christian Identity

How would Christians react, especially those who knew people in the movement and perhaps even had some sympathy for some of their ideas? Would they assimilate to mainstream views, turning on (and turning in) their Christian Identity friends? Or might they reject the accusers? Might they even have a new respect for their movement acquaintances (“Maybe that stuff about the government being out to get us wasn't so nutty after all”)?

UPDATE: 9 a.m.: The Democracy in America blog at The Economist made a similar point yesterday about right-wing parties here and in the Netherlands. (I think the blogger is Will Wilkinson, but I can’t find a by-line on the page.) Calling Tea Partiers racists or comparing the Dutch PVV to Nazis (a comparison that Wilkinson (?) says is “not a wholly absurd rhetorical exercise”) serves only to rally the troops. Solidarity thrives on perceived injustice.

Musical Clusters

March 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston


I took the Jeopardy test two weekends ago. They were giving it during the New York Times Travel Expo at the Javits Center. This was one of the questions, and definitely not my category. I guessed Jay-Z. Go ahead, laugh.

That guess, as I later discovered, was off. But I didn’t realize how far off. Now I know.

(Click on the image for a larger, legible view.)

You are looking at a section of a map of clustering created by Emden Gansner, Yifan Hu, Stephen Kobourov, and Chris Volinsky of AT&T Labs. It’s based on data from last.fm, a website that allows you to create, in effect, your own radio station, one that plays only the music you like. The clustering and connecting lines are based on the data set of listener preferences (the equivalent of Amazon’s “people who liked X also liked Y”). Jay-Z clusters near Kanye and OutKast, with links to several other rappers as well. No surprises there. But Eminem is something of a loner, down near the Jazzland border, divorced not just from Kim but from everyone except D12.

The entire map looks like this.


That gray archiplelago in the southeast corner is Classical (mostly composers rather than performers). The island in the Northeast is international, mostly Reggae. Neither has a link to the mainland.

Last July, I posted graphic of music performers arrayed on the London Underground map (here). That one was fun but idiosyncratic. This one is based on data. Some of the results are curious – Eminem’s isolation, or Solange apparently a more nodal figure than Beyoncé.

The full map is here. It’s a pdf, and you can search for a musician the way you would search for text in a document. You can also expand the map without losing resolution. But be warned, you can spend a lot more time there than you might have intended.

Scandal for School

March 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two headlines about candidate Jim Doyle:

• Doyle Calls for City to “Get Tough on Illegal Immigration”
• Doyle Admits to Extra-Marital Affair with One Time Aide

Which story are you going to read first? And which one are you likely to remember?

If you do want to read them, they are here. But you should know first that Jim Doyle is a fictional candidate, created by Beth Miller for an experimental study. The control group read five news stories on Jim’s policy positions. For the experimentals, Miller ditched a homeland security story and switched in a story about the affair (the story omitted any mention of positions that might have been involved).


John Sides summarized the results over at The Monkey Cage.

Unsurprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were more likely to remember the story -- 47% did so, compared to 32% of those who read the fourth policy-related story.

Perhaps more surprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were, at the end of the experiment, better able to recall what issues the candidate talked about and what positions the candidate took on these issues.

I wasn’t surprised. And I don’t think that what really matters is the scandal. Instead, what’s important about the scandal story is that it humanizes Jim Doyle. It makes him a real person rather than a purveyor of policies. And for some reason, we assimilate ideas more easily when they come from people. (I wish Miller had included a third condition – with Story #4 as something humanizing but not scandalous.)

I wasn’t surprised because in teaching, it has long seemed to me that students were better able to understand a book or article once I could convince them that it was written by a real human being, a person. As I blogged two years ago, my students seem to think that all readings assigned in college are written by some anonymous consortium created for the sole purpose of making their lives difficult. In the students’ minds, the author of all these readings is They.

Here’s how I put it in that post (apologies for recycling my garbage here, but I do like this anecdote).

I was teaching criminology, using the textbook I myself had written. It was listed on the syllabus that way, and the book had my name on the cover. Several weeks into the semester, a student had a question about some point I was making in class or some data I was presenting. I don’t remember the topic or the issue. All I remember is that the student said, “But didn’t they say . . .” and she went on to offer some bit of information.

“They?” I asked, “What they?”

“In the book. Didn’t they say that . . . .” she started to repeat her question.

“They is me,” I said. “I wrote that book.”

She seemed genuinely stunned, and I sensed that many in the class shared her confusion. The book was a school textbook; therefore it must have been written by the same “They” that churned out all textbooks. Yet here was someone they knew, a very ordinary person they saw two or three days a week, claiming to have written the book, and the evidence on the cover seemed to support his claim.

Once students see that these readings are not handed down like sacred texts from a distant oracle, they can more easily engage themselves with the ideas. If I were teaching theory, I would try to knock the big guys off their pedestals – Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and the others. If it takes scandal to do it, fine. But I would use any stories that make them fallible human beings

Tally's Corner - Then and Now

March 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

EXTERIOR, GHETTO NEIGHBORHOOD, MORNING. Long shot from above. The film is in black and white, sepia toned. We hear nothing except the music soundtrack, a muted trumpet. Small clusters of men stand at the corners talking. A truck crawls up the street and stops. We see the truck driver, a white man, lean his head out the window and say something. The men shake their heads, and the truck moves on, stopping at each corner with the same result. The truck moves away growing smaller till it’s almost out of the frame.

Cut to: INT. TRUCK CAB

TRUCK DRIVER
Lazy bastards. They wouldn’t take a job
if it was handed to ’em on a platter.

It’s the opening of Tally’s Corner, by Elliot Liebow. I loved teaching that book, and each semester, when I would reread it, I would imagine that opening scene as a movie. The sepia tone must have seeped into my imagination from the cover photo.

Last week, the Washington Post (here) finally revealed where Tally’s Corner was – 11th and M Streets NW, Washington, DC. Less than a mile from the White House.


Liebow went to the corner every day for a year and a half in 1962-63. He came home every evening and wrote up his field notes. And in 1967, he published one of the great books in sociology.

He knew the men and their lives in a way the truck driver never could or would. After that opening scene, Liebow takes us back to the corner for a closer look. Most of the men have reasons for turning down a day’s work, reasons that even the truck driver would consider legitimate.

But then Liebow turns his and our attention to those few that might fit with the truck driver’s views. They are the ones we have to understand if we are to understand this world.

Despite their small numbers, the don’t-work-and-don’t-want-to-work minority is especially significant in that they represent the strongest and clearest expression of those values and attitudes associated with making a living which, to varying degrees, are found throughout the streetcorner world. These men . . . are carrying out the implications of their values and experiences to their logical, inevitable conclusions. In this sense, the others have yet to come to terms with themselves and the world they live in.

The book is about the realities of that world, realities (“experiences”) that make not wanting to work logical and inevitable. But it’s also about the men as individuals and as part of the streetcorner culture that attenuates their relation to conventional work and family roles. As Liebow says about the problem of work,

Some of the [reasons for not working] are objective and reside principally in the job; some are subjective and reside principally in the man. The line between them, however, is not a clear one.

That was then, nearly a half century ago. Now, Tally’s Corner looks like this.


The book is about race and income and poverty and social class and labor markets. How much those have changed is still an open question. But even if they had been completely transformed, I would still use and reread Tally’s Corner because it is also about the self and identity and micro-cultures, about how we construct these out of the ephemeral materials of social interaction, and how these intersect with the dominant social institutions of work and family.

UPDATE (March 4, 8 a.m.): If I were a college teacher, I would certainly have busted the above post as plagiarism. As Baptiste’s comment says, Mike3550 at Scatterplot posted about Tally’s Corner a day before I posted this. I unwittingly used exactly the same title for my post, and I used a photo from the same Google view that Mike links to. But honest, professor, I had not looked at Scatterplot when I wrote this. I got the idea from some other blog (which one I don’t remember, but it wasn’t Scatterplot) that had the link to the WaPo article.

Mike’s post is much better – more thorough and informative. Unlike my post, he provides real data – about the corner itself and about the gentrification of that whole neighborhood. Read it here.

Tom Hanks - “Toddlers & Tiaras”

March 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Look at this.” I was on the train to work, and a colleague in the Education department was tapping his finger on this picture on the front page of the New York Times “Styles” section.



The Times had printed the picture so large that it did not completely fit above the fold.

The article was not about the sexualization of pre-teen girls. It was about kids who are fashion designers. Still, as my colleague pointed out, this 11-year-old seems to be going for a look that is far from kid innocence.

How do we respond to the sexualization of children, especially girls? It seems like a particularly American idea, though I’m not familiar enough with other cultures to know. Do other countries have beauty pageants for girls who still count their ages in single digits?

“Little Miss Sunshine” was one response, though it seems more a satire of the American success ethic than of kiddie beauty contests (my post on it is here). Those contests seem like parodies or satires of themselves. But in case not, here’s Tom Hanks (on Jimmy Kimmel’s show Sunday night after the Oscars) with his home movie.

“Those People”

February 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post here discussed Daniel Hamermesh’s observation that the relatively stingy welfare policies of the US stem from two aspects of American culture – optimism and a lack of concern about inequality. But why are Americans so sanguine about inequality when over 40 million of their fellow Americans are so poor that, according to the official definition of poverty, they cannot afford to adequately feed their families?

Maybe it’s because Americans do not consider the poor to be their “fellow Americans,” as part of the same community. Claude Fischer discusses a more general version of this world-view in the central chapter of his recent (and excellent) book Made in America. He calls it “voluntarism” – the idea that the only legitimate groups are the ones that people voluntarily join. While people have strong obligations to others in those groups, they have little or no obligations towards people not in those groups. Under the principle of voluntarism, if I haven’t voluntarily joined a group that provides assistance to poor people, I have no obligations to them, and for the government to use my tax dollars to do so is tantamount to robbery.

The voluntarism ideology may exist in varying degrees in many other societies. Still, some countries have more generous welfare than others, and within the US, some states have more generous policies than others. These differences may reflect the social distance that the majority feel from the poor. If we perceive the poor as similar to us, as part of our community, we will be more generous. If the poor are a different type of person, we will not want our taxpayer dollars going to “those people.”

What might be influencing those perceptions of similarity or difference?

Ten years ago, economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote put the question bluntly in the title of their paper, “Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?” (A pdf of the paper is here.) Is there something else going on besides voluntarism, optimism, and concern about inequality? Their answer was yes, and that something else is race.

They compared measures of welfare spending among countries and within the US among states. In both cases, racial homogeneity was a strong predictor of welfare generosity. Here is a scatterplot of countries.

(Click on the chart for a larger view that will allow you to read the country names.)

The less homogenous the population of the country, the less generous are its welfare policies.

In the US, as anybody who has been here for more than about five minutes knows, the welfare/poverty issue is not just about income and nutrition and inequality. It’s about race. So Alesina, et. al. plotted welfare against percent African American in the fifty states.

The greater a state’s black population, the stingier are its welfare benefits

There is a strong negative relationship between the generosity of a state’s program and the share of the state’s population that is black: the raw correlation is 49 percent.

True, state revenue is also a factor – the states with lower welfare and more blacks are also states that are poorer, and those lower state budgets may affect welfare payments. But it’s not just the lack of funds.

When we regress the maximum AFDC payment on both state median income and the share of the state population that is black, our primary result is still significant. The estimated regression is (standard errors are in parentheses)

maximum AFDC payment = –149 (72)– 692* (131) percent black + 0.017* (0.002) median income N = 50, R2 = 0.71.

As the authors summarize this aspect of their study:

Americans think of the poor as members of some different group than themselves, while Europeans think of the poor as members of their group.

Views of Poverty – Optimism and Stinginess

February 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ask Americans how much income a family needs to “just get by” – to be not poor – and the answers will generally be a number that’s 50-55% of the median income. That’s not how we compute the official poverty line, though. That number is based the price of food. The poverty line is three times the amount a family would need to spend to provide the minimum adequate nutrition.

In European countries, as Daniel Hamemersh at Freakonomics has learned, the poverty line is based on relative income, usually about 50% of the median. (When the US poverty formula was created, that three-times-food formula did work out to about 55% of the national median. Now it’s closer to 40% of the national median. The family at the poverty line can still feed itself, just as it could fifty years ago. But it’s much farther away from the average US family.)

Hamemersh says that this choice of how to calculate poverty reflects two American characteristics:

• optimism – if low incomes go up just a little, and food prices remain stable, nobody will be “poor.”
• lack of concern about inequality

Hamermesh contrasts this with the view from across the pond.

In Europe, even with income growth, unless inequality decreases, the fraction of households in poverty won’t change. How pessimistic, yet how concerned about equality!

Optimism goes with stinginess towards the poor; pessimism with generosity.

Here are some charts that I used in a post last month about the belief in the the efficacy of work (the first two bars). But the last two questions support Hamermesh’s ideas about the difference between the US and other countries on the question of inequality and welfare. (The data come from a Brookings survey.)

(Click on the chart for a larger, readable view.)

Your Money's Worth

February 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

My grandfather was in the retail business – furniture. When he and my grandmother went shopping – for other things, not furniture – she was sometimes stunned by the prices. “What makes this so expensive?” she would ask. My grandfather, pretending a careful examination of the item, would nod his head thoughtfully and say, “Profit.”

I remembered Grandpa Jack when I saw this graph posted by Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist. It shows healthcare expenditures per capita plotted against GDP per capita.


As you would expect, the richer a nation is, the more it spends on healthcare, just as it spends more on food, entertainment, or anything else.

Carroll adds:

Notice two things however. The first is that Norway and Luxembourg (the two countries farthest to the right), fall below the line. This is because – presumably – at some point you can spend more money, but what’s the point? The drugs won’t work better,* the advice is still the same, and the doctors can’t do any more. At some point, spending more is just waste, because the outcomes don’t get any better.     The second thing to notice is the US. You can’t miss it. It’s the big red dot that’s way at the top. We’ve chosen to ignore what I just said.

It may be “waste,” but that money has to be going somewhere.

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* A while ago I posted (here) some charts comparing the US and several other countries on the costs of various aspects of healthcare – standard procedures, office visits, widely-used drugs. I included the line, “Since . . . you get what you pay for, our Lipitor must be four to ten times as good as the Lipitor that Canadians take.” It was my only post ever to get Boinged, and for a day the number of visits here climbed to about 2600, doing my heart much more good than would any prescription meds.

Race to the Bottom?

February 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Scott Lemieux passes along this information from his friend Ken Sherrill:

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

• South Carolina – 50th
• North Carolina – 49th
• Georgia – 48th
• Texas – 47th
• Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country. Let’s keep it that way.

A convincing study of the effects of unionization on student performance would have to take into account a host of variables – demographic, budgetary, etc. – and their interactions. It should also have more sensitive measures of union strength and perhaps of outcome variables as well. But this is a start.

The message seems to be that if you are going to argue that the absence of teachers’ unions brings educational benefits to schoolchildren, you’re starting out down by about five runs in the first inning.

A complete list of the states is here. (And what’s up with South Carolina? It seems to be intent on making itself the punch line to a variety of jokes. See this previous post, for example.)

Lies and “Defacto Truth”

February 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some wacko Teabagger (is that a redundancy?), one Mark Williams, posted an appeal encouraging his comrades to pose as union members at a Wisconsin SEIU rally and act outrageously so as to discredit the union. They would have signs ‘that say things like “screw the taxpayer!”’ Then “we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters.” (After the post went viral, Williams took it down, but you can still see a cached version here.)

Williams added

Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.

Has Williams been searching the PoliSci literature? A couple of years ago, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler published their research about the effect of responses to political lies. What should you do when a poltician says something that is just not true? Providing accurate information would seem like the logical way to go. But Nyhan and Reifler did experiments showing that providing the relevant facts doesn’t work. It can have even a “backfire” effect. Those whose political views are in tune with the lie become even stronger in their beliefs. (Links to the paper and to a WaPo article about it are on Brendan’s blog – here.)

The examples Nyhan used were conservative lies (e.g., Bush saying that his tax cuts increased revenues), so we don’t know whether liberals might be more rational about facts. Also, Nyhan’s sample was hardly random – 130 students at a Midwest, Catholic university. But given the tenacity of the belief, especially among conservatives, that Obama is a Muslim born outside the US, these 130 might not be all that different from the general population.

It doesn’t matter if the “defacto truth” is not factual. What this research shows (and what Williams intuitively senses) is the futility of refudiation.


HT: The Political Carnival.

Tattoo Who?

February 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston


When I saw this*



I immediately thought about the problem of cognitive consistency. (Earlier posts on cognitive dissonance and consistency are here and here.)

Our anti-gay friends, some of them, base their position on the Bible. Not the New Testament – Jesus didn’t have much to say on the topic. Instead, they go back to Levticus (18:22). The guy above is using the New American Standard translation: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.”

The trouble with Leviticus is that you have to be very selective about your abominations. The famous “Letter to Laura” skewered radio talker Laura Schlessinger on this problem of consistency when she cited this same verse. Here’s a sample:

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

(Snopes has the whole letter and much more.)

Aaron Sorkin turned letter into a scene on The West Wing complete with a version of Dr. Laura.



As for the righteous fellow in the first picture, I wonder if he felt any cognitive dissonance when he turned the page in his Bible, read the next chapter, and found this (Lev. 19:28):

You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD.

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*HT: Chad Crawford  via a Tweet from Incurable Hippie.

Lumet – First and Last

February 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“12 Angry Men” (1957) was Sidney Lumet’s first film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” his last, a half century later. “Devil” had gotten good reviews, so I recorded it a while ago. I intended to watch it last night. But when I turned on the TV, “12 Angry Men” was just starting on TCM. I’ve seen it a few times, maybe more, but I had a hard time turning it off. After a half hour or so, I switched on the DVD and went for “The Devil.”

Things change in 50 years.

In “12 Angry Men,” jurors deliberate, exploring the details of a murder case. In the room, personality, emotion, and position affect reason, memory, and perception. We see the group dynamics, the interaction and persuasion. The film is in black and white and has essentially one set, the jury room. There is no “action” (except a moment when one angry man threatens to hit someone but is easily restrained). Characters occasionally stand up and walk to another spot in the room or to the window. That’s the action

[Spoiler Alert]

“Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” centers on a jewelry store robbery. The store proprietor, a seventyish woman shoots the robber. Then he shoots her. Later, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke (they are brothers) beat a heroin dealer in his apartment, Hoffman shoots the heroin dealer’s customer (nodded out on a bed in the apartment) and then shoots the dealer. They go to the house of a man who is blackmailing Hawke. Hoffman shoots the man, then points the gun at Hawke’s head. While the two brothers are trying to decide whether Hoffman will shoot Hawke, the blackmailer’s wife shoots Hoffman. Later, Hoffman lies in a hospital (the shooting was bad but not fatal). Albert Finney (Hoffman’s father) kills him by suffocating him with a pillow.

Six shootings, one asphyxiation, mostly all in the family, and all shown explicitly on the screen.

Both are good movies, but what a difference. And oddly enough, even though the Angry Men are confined to a single room for nearly the whole film, it’s “Devil” that has more an air of claustrophobia. The characters are trapped in their lives, trapped by their own decisions.

Simplicity Patterns

February 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Moral clarity” always seemed to me like a self-flattering way of saying “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” Moral clarity turns the complicated into the simple. It reduces a complex issue into a choice between good and evil. William Bennett popularized the phrase in his arguments supporting the Iraq invasion. Terrorism is evil, therefore invading Iraq is good. Unfortunately, reality turned out to be a lot more complicated.

The call for “Moral Clarity” comes mostly from the right, and not just on fighting terrorism. Go to the “Center for Moral Clarity,” click on “Key National Issues,” and you’ll find support for “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act” (be warned however that this page does not spell out the moral clarity of leaving 40 million Americans without health insurance).

Does this preference for the simple over the complex generally distinguish the political right wing from the left? (See an earlier post on this and tolerance for ambiguity here.) And does it carry over into other areas? Is the political also the personal?

OK Cupid is a dating site. It isn’t about terrorism or health care. But the people who run it (Harvard math grads who turn dating into data) have looked at the correlations and discovered some non-obvious connections. Looking to get lucky? Ask your prospective date if they like the taste of beer. Those who do, both men and women, are 60% more likely to say they would consider sleeping with someone on the first date.

The same sorts of questions fit with the idea that conservatives prefer simplicity both in politics and people.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Here were the political questions that these were based on.
On the surface, liking your peeps to be simple or complex shouldn’t have much to do with your position on gay marriage or creationism. But it does.

Blogging for Dollars?

February 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I got religion. Or more accurately, religion’s got me. The Bulletin for the Study of Religion, is cross-posting my “When Prophecy’s Faked” entry of a couple of weeks ago, a liaison I never expected. The lord works in mysterious ways.

I’m flattered. But unfortunately, this is no way to get rich. It wouldn’t be even if Arianna Huffington had been the one spreading my prose across the cybersphere. HuffPo pays its bloggers, even sociologist worthies like the redoubtable Philip Cohen, exactly the same sum as does ReligBull – $0.

That sum, it turns out, is not much less than a blog post’s true worth, even at the Huffington Post with its 15 million page views a day. Nate Silver does the math (here):

Of those 15 million views at the HuffPo main page, only a small fraction come to the blogs housed at HuffPo. Silver estimates that the median blog post got about 550 page views. How much is that in American money? Silver calculates it as $3.44.

Ms. Huffington just sold her Post to AOL for $315 million. But if you were thinking about retiring to the Bahamas by monetizing your blog, maybe you should reconsider. (My friend Michael says he thought that to “monetize” something meant to turn it into water lilies. Maybe that’s the better idea.)

Skill Transfer - Quote of the Day

February 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

People who made a ton of money in the business world sometimes run for public office. Their entry level aims are usually somewhere near the top – governor, senator, even president. And they often tout their business success as evidence that they’ll be excellent public servants or that they “know how to create jobs.”

It reminds me of high school – the student government elections and Assembly Day when the jock’s speech always centered on the idea that his experience on the football team qualified him to be president of the student body.

I was thinking about this again when I read Sudhir Vankatesh’s piece in Wired about prostitution. He notes that the Internet has not been kind to the pimp role. Hookers have become much more independent.

I met 11 pimps working out of midtown Manhattan in 1999, and all were out of work within four years. One enlisted in the military; two have been homeless. Only one now has a full-time job, working as a janitor in a charter school.*

I imagined a pimp speechifying about his administrative role, his vast experience dealing with people, bringing buyers and sellers together – making a market really. All these qualified him for a leadership position in business or government. It’s the same kind of bullshit peddled by the quarterback in high school or the former CEO running for governor. The difference is that the pimps know it and take a more realistic view of their job history.

I asked one of them how pimping experience helps him in the legit economy: “You learn one thing,” he said. “For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.”

* Charter-school advocates often argue that these schools, freed from the union stranglehold over hiring and firing, can be much more effective in their personnel selection. I guess they have a point.

Seaward with the C-word

February 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(Warning: this post is about language, and it contains some very bad words. When we talk about language, if we can’t use the actual words that we’re talking about, then the terrorists have won.)

It’s fun to notice the differences between American and British English, especially profanity – probably because in most respects the languages are so similar. Sure, it’s “ass” here and “arse” there, but the meaning is the same. Some words, like “wanker,” have crossed the Atlantic (maybe because we didn’t really have a good word for it).

Then there’s the C-word.

A BBC presenter,* Jeremy Paxman, slipped in referring to the budget “cuts,” and it came out as “the C-word” (story and video here). A month earlier, another presenter made a similar mistake when referring to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt. (The presenter’s name: James Naughtie. Enough said.)

We’re a bit more prudish about language. In the US, inadvertent or spontaneous profanity on TV has brought heavy fines. In the UK, it’s been merely a giggle. In the US, “The King’s Speech” is rated R for language. In the UK, it’s 12A (under 12 years must be accompanied by an adult).

And in the New Statesman last week, Laurie Penny spoke up for the C-word. She finds it “empowering,” especially when uttered by a woman.

On this side of the Atlantic as well, it’s the word that carries the strongest taboo. Probably more so than in Britain. I think we use also it differently. We do not use it to refer to men. My first inkling of this came thanks to the Monty Python travel agent sketch. The Tourist cannot pronounce the letter C. The travel agent, Bounder, asks, “Can you say the letter 'K'?”

Tourist: Oh yes, Khaki, king, kettle, Kuwait, Keble Bollege Oxford
Bounder: Why don't you say the letter 'K' instead of the letter 'C'?
Tourist: what you mean.....spell bolour with a K
Bounder: Yes
Tourist: Kolour. Oh that's very good, I never thought of that. What a silly bunt.**

No American, whether in anger or in a comedy sketch, would call a man (including himself) a cunt. But here’s Laurie Penny:

The first time I ever used it, I was 12 years old, and being hounded by a group of sixth-form boys who just loved to corner me on the stairs and make hilarious sexy comments. One day, one of them decided it would be funny to pick me up by the waist and shake me. I spat out the words “put me down, you utter cunt,” and the boy was so shocked that he dropped me instantly.

Manliness isn’t the issue. It’s not like when we call a guy a “pussy.” When the Brits call a man a cunt, it apparently means merely that he is completely inept, perhaps contemptible In the US, she would have called him “asshole.” Cunt just carries too much gender denotation, at least to my American ears.

It reminds me of something I heard long ago in college. A bunch of guys were talking, and one said that some girl was “a schmuck.”

“You should never call a girl a schmuck,” said another guy, pausing before finishing the thought, “unless she’s a real schmuck.”

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* A non-profane difference. American TV doesn’t have “presenters” or “newsreaders.”

** In the only YouTube versions I could find, this punchline has been edited out.

Oobleck and the Gulf Disaster

February 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Oobleck is not high-tech chemistry. The name comes from Dr. Seuss, and making the stuff is child’s play – mix cornflour and water – which is why grade-school kids are familiar with it. Also why YouTube has lots of videos of people running on water. (Mythbusters got in the act too.)

Now it turns out that Oobleck might have stopped the BP underwater gusher in the Gulf. Mud, the usual “top kill” substance, was useless because the flow of oil was so rapid. But oobleck’s “non-Newtonian” (Seussian?) properties might have done the trick. (Wired has the story here.)

Jonathan Katz, a physicist, apparently suggested oobleck to the Department of Energy team that was assembled three weeks into the disaster.

Katz did some quick math and saw that a half-cornstarch drilling mud would suppress the turbulence and sink in one coherent slug. Unfortunately, no one listened.
“I have no idea why they didn’t pay attention,” said Richard Garwin, a retired IBM physicist who was also part of the DOE-convened team.

In 1986, the mystery of the Challenger disaster stopped being mysterious and became instantly understandable when Richard Feynman dropped a rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water. This wasn’t rocket science. Or rather, it was rocket science, but it was the part that a third-grader could understand.

These weren’t failures of science (let’s assume that the oobleck theory is correct). Maybe they weren’t even failures of scientists. More likely they were failures of organization. We need to know more about how the structure and culture of organizations keeps some ideas from getting very far, or from getting in the door at all . . . until it’s too late.

The Wisdom of Crowds XLV

February 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s become almost a tradition here at the SocioBlog: A big football game that generates widespread betting, and we once again consider “the wisdom of crowds” – the idea that the collective guess of the crowd (those people interested enough to take a stand) will be superior to the that of any one expert or group of experts.

I’ve been skeptical about this idea, at least with regards to football betting. This blog was only a few months old when I first posted about it (here), and readers who took the hint and went against the crowd won a sweet bet on the Bears. I’ve revisited the hypothesis a few times (here and here), including last year’s Superbowl (here), when the crowd was heavily backing the favorites, the Colts, driving the line from 3½ points up to 6. But the Saints won the game outright.

This year, the line opened with the Packers favored by 2½ or 3 points* and has not budged. The betting is equally divided, which is good news for the bookies. They’ll make their 5-10% no matter which side wins.

The only movement has been on the under/over line – the combined total points by both teams. That line opened at about 46, and went down to 44½. My guess is that this early shift represented “the smart money.” Now the line is gradually going back up, and may be as high as 46 by game time. Apparently the public is looking for a high-scoring game.

If you’re a contrarian, if you lean towards the wisdom of bookmakers rather than the wisdom of crowds, you’ll take the under and be happy with a 23-21 final score. It’s not a bet I would be eager to make however. The trouble with betting the under, as a gambler explained to me long ago, is that you sit there watching the game rooting for nothing to happen.

Go Steelers.**

UPDATE: The under/over line did not move much. Apparently, there was no strong crowd consensus, though if there was an imbalance, it was towards the over, which turned out to be the right choice. Final score: Packers 31, Steelers 25. The Packers played well; the Steelers made some costly errors.

* As of this writing (Saturday night), if you want to bet the Steelers plus the three points, you have to give up odds of 120-100 (i.e., you get $100 if you win; you pay $120 if you lose). If you take only 2½ points, you can get odds as low as 105-100. And conversely, if you bet the Packers, you pay more to give only the 2½. But it looks as though the line is inching up. By game time, I expect most bookmakers will have the line at 3.

** It is a bit more difficult to root for Pittsburgh this year – not-so-gentle Ben and his deserved rating among fans as the Superbowl’s most disliked player, James Harrison as #1 in being fined by the NFL. And according to yesterday’s New York Times, the Steelers are even on the wrong side of the concussion issue while the Packers are on the side of the angels.

Graphing Ideas about Marriage (Me vs. USA Today)

February 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As someone with the visual aptitude of gravel, I shouldn’t be edging into Flâneuse territory. But when I saw this graph in USA Today this morning, I was frustrated.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)
Responses, by age group, when asked if they want to marry:

SOURCES: Match.com/MarketTools survey of 5,199 men and women who either have never been married or are widowed, divorced or separated.

I found it hard to make comparisons from one age group to another. In the online edition, the layout was better – all in a row – and the addition of even a single color helped. (Odd that USA Today, the newspaper that led the way in using color, gave its print readers the graph in only black-and-white, or more accurately gray-and-gray.)

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I thought I’d try my own hand with my rudimentary knowledge of Excel.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

What do you think?

ASA v. ACLU?

February 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I feel like the eighth guy in the Asch line-length experiment (video here .) since on one central issue I find myself siding with Glenn Beck and against the ASA.

For those who were out of the room and missed the commotion, Beck has been vilifying Frances Fox Piven, a 78-year-old sociologist who for decades has written and spoken about poverty and welfare. She has been a target of Beck’s before. This time, after she suggested that the unemployed take to the streets to demand government action that creates jobs, Beck called her an “enemy of the Constitution.” (more here)

Piven received hate mail and some death threats, presumably from Beck’s followers, who also posted truly vicious comments directed at Piven on Beck’s website The Blaze. The ASA called on the Fox network

to control the encouragement of violence that has run rampant in recent months. . . . . The right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents.

It’s the free speech part that bothers me. I guess I’m more ACLU than ASA. Yes, the world would be a better place if Beck weren’t Beck. His faux-naïf, just-a-guy act barely hides the reality that he’s a nasty piece of work. And some of his fans are even nastier. What he says is often wrong – inaccurate, illogical, even nutty. But Beck didn’t call for violence. He just said that Piven is a terrible person who has dangerous ideas and says bad things.

If what Beck said “encourages violence” and is therefore not protected speech, then nobody can be allowed to say that someone has done something really bad (let alone being “the worst person in the world”). You could probably find equally venomous name-calling directed at academics like John Yoo. I mean, calling someone a war criminal is a fairly serious accusation. Possibly, those accusations made some readers so angry that they sent Yoo death threats. (If so, it would be altogether fitting, given his rather tolerant position on death threats.) Were those articles about Yoo at Salon, the Atlantic, and elsewhere “encouraging violence”? Were they therefore not protected free speech?

As someone said, you can’t blame an idea for the people who believe in it. After the Arizona shooting, people went scurrying around trying to show that the shooter had been inspired by books from the opposite side. Marx, Ayn Rand, and possibly Hitler were on Loughner’s reading list (so were Peter Pan and The Phantom Tollbooth). But even if we could pinpoint a particular book or TV show, even if Loughner had said, “The Manifesto made me do it,” the book and its writer still have the protection of the First Amendment. And that’s a good thing.

So the ASA is right to ask Beck to tone it down (not that it will have any impact on Beck even in the unlikely that he is listening). But they are wrong to imply that his rhetoric is not included as protected free speech.

In the Asch experiment, the subject – the eighth guy to offer his opinion – always felt uncomfortable when the other seven people saw things differently from what he saw. That’s how I feel, and it’s which is why I’ve hesitated to post this.